How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
Theater & Music Theater Courses
Theater & Music Theater
Designed for people with little or no previous training in dance, the class will be a mixture of movement techniques, improvisation, choreography, observing, writing, and discussing.
In this studio course open to all, we’ll ramble in the unknown searching for embodied philosophy, thinking art-making, and clarity that’s open for revision.
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? In this studio course open to all, we'll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects.
This course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, performance studies, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary "Rust Belt" cities.
This workshop will introduce students to the craft of writing words and music for the musical theatre.
As it approaches its centennial, the Miss America Pageant (1921- ) stands among the most enduring — and enduringly controversial — popular performance traditions of American life and culture. This course offers an intensive, method-based historical overview of how "Miss America" as both idea and event documents the shifting ways gender, sexuality, race and embodiment been comprehended in the United States, even as it also examines the disparate ways the "beauty pageant" as a performance genre has been adopted and adapted by/for communities excluded by the rules of Miss America.
This course will largely focus on some Shakespeare's "afterlives" of the past twenty years.
We explore McDonagh's extreme imagination, its roots in Irish Gothic, Grand Guignol, the Grimm Brothers, Antonin Artaud and the theatre of the absurd and its uncomfortable use of race and disability.
This course addresses when and why producing political theatre matters.
Students will have the chance to immerse themselves in the theater-making process, writing, directing and acting texts that they will devise under Pascal Rambert's guidance. Co-taught by celebrated French playwright and director Pascal Rambert and Florent Masse.
In a working classroom, we will discern what is funny to a modern audience. We will analyze where the sense of humor lies in a script and practice the physical and linguistic techniques used in clowning, Commedia dell'arte, slapstick, farce, satire, dark comedy, absurdism, comedy of manners, and naturalism.
Creative Intellect is a collaborative workshop course designed to bridge the critical and creative dimensions of performance research.
This course will examine a wide variety of highly imaginative plays for children and teens, focusing on how they work as plays and the challenges they present to youth and family audiences.